Product Managers: It's Time to Own the Full Product Lifecycle

As a product manager, you're ultimately responsible for the success of your products.

Some frame the role as the "CEO of the product". And while many PMs bristle at that comparison, the core responsibility is true - you are accountable for your products' overall success, especially commercially.

But there's a big problem - most product management tools today don't support that full ownership. They focus myopically on the engineering side of the role - aligning teams, specifying requirements, and shipping products.

Legacy product management tools completely ignore what happens after features are released.

Gartner research shows that 45% of product launches are delayed by at least one month. And Harvard Business School found that of over 30,000 new products launched since 2012, around 80% have failed to meet their business targets. Clearly, just getting products out the door is not enough.

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To drive true product success, PMs must own the complete lifecycle:

• Identifying the best market opportunities
• Building products to effectively address those opportunities
• Enabling sales and marketing to successfully commercialize the products

But most PM tools today fall short in enabling that full ownership. Here are some of their key gaps:

1. Not capturing full company context. Many tools allow you to attach "insights" to roadmap items. But that's where it ends. Those insights don't inform downstream workflows like building PRDs, GTM plans, or sales enablement. The critical context is siloed.
2. Lack of deep CRM integrations. Alignment with sales is critical for product success. But most PM tools lack any CRM integration. Those that do offer simplistic, surface-level integrations. This prevents PMs from leveraging deal data to prioritize their roadmaps. It also makes it impossible to enable sales with product details in their workflows.
3. No support for GTM and adoption. Commercializing products is just as important as building them. But PM tools ignore this, stopping at launch. They provide no capabilities for GTM planning, creating promotional content, or driving product adoption. It's a massive missed opportunity.

At Ignition, we believe it's time for a new era of product management - one where PMs are empowered to drive success across the complete lifecycle. Our AI-powered platform makes that possible:

• Ingests all your market & customer data from across the company
• Identifies the best opportunities to pursue based on $ opportunity
• Builds roadmaps to effectively capture those opportunities
• Creates content and collateral to promote new products & features
• Enables sales to close more deals by automatically enabling them when features ship

The result is PMs can consolidate their sprawling tool stack, get to market faster, and surface 20-30% more upsell opportunities. All while truly owning the full product lifecycle needed to drive real business impact.

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"80% of products fail to meet their business targets" - Harvard Business School.

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Here's an example of how it works in practice:

Let's say you're a PM at a SaaS company, and sales mentions they're consistently losing deals to a key competitor. With Ignition, you can:

1. Instantly see all competitor mentions across sales calls, support tickets, win-loss notes to quantify the threat
2. Identify the specific competitor features prospects find most valuable
3. Adjust your roadmap to prioritize matching/exceeding those features
4. Create a sales battlecard to help reps better handle those competitive deals
5. Alert sales the moment those features ship so they can revisit lost opportunities

This closed-loop process ensures the products you build have maximum impact on the metrics that matter most. And it elevates the PM role to be a true driver of business growth, not just a feature factory.

If you're a product manager today, ask yourself - are your current tools enabling you to own the complete product lifecycle? Are they empowering you to be a strategic business leader?

If not, I invite you to check out Ignition. We're on a mission to redefine product management for the AI era - and drive a new level of product and business success. Reach out if you'd like to learn more!

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